Hope
by forensicpathologistninja
Summary: Just a one-shot about what would happen if Brennan were to get shot in a stakeout or something. Set some time before Zach left. Rated T because it's depressing.


Scenario: Bones is in the hospital after being shot during a stake-out.

Booth couldn't even believe the woman lying so lifelessly in the bed beside him was the same woman he'd spent 5 years arguing with, laughing with, talking to. She was so… limp. It was the only word he could think of. She didn't move with the restlessness that characterized his Bones. She didn't look at him with that delighted smile she reserved for those times she'd figured out something everyone else found so trivial but she thought so important. She didn't look at him with that confused frown he'd grown so accustomed to seeing whenever he made a pop-culture reference she didn't understand. She didn't even open her eyes.

He felt lost, stuck in limbo, waiting for her to do something. The doctors said to give her time, she'd lost a lot of blood, she'd hit her head, head injuries were tricky. It had only been a day since he'd run into the hospital carrying her limp body in his arms, yelling for someone to help her; only one day since they'd taken her from him, and he'd paced the hall, waiting for some news on the woman he'd grown to love; one single day since the doctor had come to tell him that they'd done everything they could, and now it was in God's hands; that they expected her to be okay, they just didn't know when.

Then it is night, and visiting hours are over, and he doesn't want to leave but he knows they won't let him stay no matter how many times he flashes his badge. He decides to bring a movie by in the morning, and watch it with her. They say that coma patients can hear what's going on around them. And thinking about this gives him hope.

But one day turns into two, and she still does not open her eyes. First the doctors say to give her a week, and then they say give her a month. Then they stop giving deadlines at all.

He and the squints comfort each other during the hours they are not allowed to be by her side. But when they are at her side, they only speak of topics so sweet it makes him want to vomit.

He takes time off of work to be with her, but then his vacation days run out and he's forced to go back. But he refuses to go into the field; he simply takes a temporary desk job, from 9 to 5, not working any overtime because whenever he's not at work he's with her. After they passed the two month mark, the nurses took pity on him and started letting him stay after hours. So he sleeps in a chair beside her bed, and he holds her hand to let her know that he's there, even though no one is certain that this will make a difference.

The squints visit her and him, and he visits them from time to time when his deskwork gets to be too much for him. None of them speak of the elephant in the room. None of them mention that as each day passes it becomes less and less likely that she will ever wake up.

After 6 month, his boss tells him that he has to start taking fieldwork or he'll be fired. So he does, but only small things, and he still doesn't stay after five or arrive before nine. And when he runs out of movies to watch with his Bones, he tells her about all the interesting cases she's missing out on, trying to goad her into waking up. But it doesn't work, and he can hear her voice in his head telling him that tax fraud is not interesting to two people who used to solve murders.

After one year, he stops visiting the lab. Angela and Hodgins still visit the hospital on occasion, but everyone else stopped long ago. He realizes that they're all slowly giving up on her, giving up the hope that they once held onto like a dying man grasps a life jacket. He cries the day he realizes that he is too.

He gets the call while he is at work, and he leaves the office immediately, calling to tell Cullen as he drives away. When he gets there, the doctors throw words at him like _neuronal activity_ and _minimal cerebral function_. They ask if he will donate her organs, and he nods, deciding that something good should come out of this.

He would never remember telling Rebecca not to bring Parker over for a while. He would never remember the nights he spent lying awake, unable to sleep because she met him in his dreams. Not that he had nightmares, no, never about his Bones, but that when he dreamed of her, he'd have to wake up to the crushing reality that she was gone, and it was like losing her all over again.

He would never even remember the funeral, but he would remember afterwards. How he'd cried and screamed at her, at God, at anything. Screamed until there was nothing left to say, no peace to make with a corpse as dead and still as the earth piled in on top of the casket, just as ugly as the hole inside of him, and nothing that would ever fill _that_. A place in the world where Bones had been and that place was left as empty as the moment before she was born, as empty as the moment before the universe. Then it starts to pour and suddenly he's cursing God again, cursing him for doing this, for taking her, for breaking his already wounded heart. "What is this, a punishment? Huh? Some sick joke?!" and then that's all because he's suddenly crying again, his tear stolen by the rain, salt absorbed, and if only the storm could begin to dilute the dry, empty ache that was trying to tear him apart, if only he could crawl in after Bones and let the worms have them both. But he can't, so instead he goes home and tries to fill the emptiness with the fiery brown liquid that helped him forget so many times before, because he is tired of the sound, the smell and salt bland flavor of his own useless tears.

He would barely remember the day Zach stopped coming to work. His memory would hold a vague recollection of weekends spent with his son, going to sporting events or out to a movie, but never to the lab they had once found such joy in, his son because he loved learning and he because _she_ was there. Buried deep in the recesses of his mind would be an image of a Christmas dinner at the Jeffersonian, held in her honor. But these memories he kept hidden from the daylight, only letting them come out to play at night, when it was dark and there was no one left to see his façade crack and his carefully placed walls crumble as he fell apart.

Some days he'd wake up so confused that he couldn't even remember his own name, where he was, why he was here. Some days he'd wake up and lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, just remembering her face. Some days he'd force himself to get out of bed and go to work, where he sat at a desk all day, filling out paperwork. And some days he didn't wake up at all.

He remembers vividly the nightmares he did have, the sudden, unbidden image of a train derailing and everything spilling out along the tracks, broken bodies in tangled, smoking wreckage, but not one of them his Bones, because his Bones was already gone. He looks at the wreckage and realizes that's exactly what it feels like, to be here, alive and alone and with no idea how he will be able to stand waking up tomorrow.

After a time, he stopped seeing the squints. Stopped visiting the people he'd learned to affectionately call his own. Stopped because it just plain hurt too much, because even when they didn't talk about her, she lingered in the spaces between words, like the smell of something burning.

He grows accustomed to his new life (if you can call his now meaningless existence a life). Time passes in a haze of weekends with his son, days filled with paperwork, lonely nights filled with bottles of amber liquid and even lonelier nights filled with naked women, who's names and faces he cannot remember any more than he can remember saying his first word. He avoids things that remind him of her, and he continues to survive (though at times he wishes he did not). In this manner, weeks turn to months and then years, and no amount of time and cliché's will lessen the pain.

Four years later, he is walking in the park, and he sees a young woman walking her dog. She accidentally drops her iPod and he is closer so he picks it up and hands it to her. And her eyes make him gasp. They are a clear icy blue, and they seem to look straight into his soul. "Bones" he breathes.

She doesn't have to tell him about the car accident when she was in high school, the one that robbed her of her eyesight, leaving her in a world without color, or light; a world where it didn't matter if her socks matched because she'd never be able to tell. She doesn't have to tell him about the transplant she had to give her back her sight, the call that lead to the miracle and the surgery that changed her life forever.

She doesn't have to tell him because he already knows.

Because for just a moment, when he looked into her eyes, it was like the past 5 years never happened. Like he'd never watched the love of his life drop to the floor like a sack of potatoes with a sickening thud that made his heart stop. Like he'd never felt the pain and desperation and hate burning behind his eyes, but not crying, no, never that, because that would make him weak and he had to be strong for her. When he looks into those eyes, it is as if he never saw Hodgins throwing up in the toilet, dry heaving painfully; like he never handed him the napkin, which he gratefully took, sealing the unspoken deal of a quiet and mutual, yet awkward friendship between them. Like he hadn't spent countless nights wandering the streets, so drunk that he didn't even remember his own name, let alone how to get home. Like he'd never shot himself in the thigh, just because he needed to know what it had felt like for her; or maybe it was just because he needed to remember what it was like to feel at all. Like he and Angela never sought comfort from each other, crying softly before coffee was served only for the two now, instead of three. It was as if Zach had never left them to seek a life elsewhere, leaving them nothing but a note; like he never witnessed Cam going frantic and sleepless, unable to repress the feelings that she usually kept secret; like he'd never tried to explain to his 8 year old son that the woman he idolized was never coming back; like he never wished he could have taken the pain away from all of them.

Like he never wished he would have been the one shot, not Bones, their beloved Bones. _His_ beloved Bones.

And for just a second, one tiny moment in time, barely the blink of an eye – he remembers what it feels like to hope.

And in the next second he realizes that it may just be enough, and suddenly he is in his car and driving like the Devil himself is running behind.

He finds himself in the one place he has avoided like the plague since his first breakdown. Awkwardly, he looks around, wondering why he chose this place when there are so many better places to remember the days spent with her.

And then his memory serves up an image of a conversation ages ago, when he made her promise to do for him what he had yet to do for her.

He clears his throat. "Hey, Bones," he starts, then looks around nervously as if maybe she'll jump out at him at any moment and laugh at him for doing such a silly thing. But all he sees are the wildflowers, and they blow in the wind, nodding up and down as if for him to continue, so he does.

"Bones, it's me, Booth. I know you don't believe in this sort of thing, but I hope that wherever you are now, you understand why I'm doing it. And why it took me so long to get here…"

And just like that, his words are carried away on the wings of a soft summer breeze, and on, he hopes, to a better place where his angel waits for him.


End file.
